In short: Il fascino dell’insolito: La stanza numero 13 (1980)

An elderly professor (Tino Scotti) returns to a small town inn where he spent some time when he was a student. We will eventually learn that this was the place where he met, loved and left the great – only – love of his life, Assunta (Carmen Scivittaro), who died young and without him from an illness.

The professor is assigned room number fourteen; on his very first night, he is awoken by party noises from what at first appears the room next to his – number twelve – but which actually turn out to come from a room that hasn’t existed for a long time, room number thirteen.

This is the second adaptation of an M.R. James tale for the Italian series of short TV movies of the supernatural called “Il fascino dell’insolito”. Like the adaptation of “The Mezzotint”, I talked about before, this also takes James’s concise tale of a haunting and does something with it that has nothing whatsoever to do with style, tone, or theme of the original story. Here, there’s even less left of James, for where the TV Mezzotint was at least still a horror story at heart, this one uses the spookery exactly for the sort of things James objected against in ghost stories: it’s a friendly tale of an old man being forgiven for past misdeeds by the ghost of his former lover, with whom he’ll dwell forevermore happily in a mirror.

So as a James adaptation, this leaves rather a lot to be desired, what with the total absence of Jamesian wallops, the strange, or the macabre. As a supernatural tale standing in the tradition of the European Romantic era, it’s not half bad. Director Paolo Poeti manages to use relatively sparse sets and simple effects to create a considerable sense of place for the inn, a place populated by a handful of broad strokes characters given life by clearly experienced actors. I also like the way the supernatural encroaches, again with simple camera effects and some clever lighting – the print I’ve seen is in black and white, though my Italian isn’t good enough to tell if the series was actually shot this way – used with a degree of intelligence. That this isn’t really the kind of supernatural tale I enjoy, and certainly not one I’m looking for in a James adaptation, isn’t fully the film’s fault.